Aerial view

The art-historical importance of the Palazzo Farnese in Caprarola, near Viterbo, is the famous pentagonal ground plan and round interior courtyard, and the interior frescoes. The Palazzo was built for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520-1589) who was made cardinal by his grandfather Pope Paul III (1468-1549), and named vice chancellor of the Holy Roman Church a year later, according him the highest position after that of the pope in the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

The architect of the construction, Giacomo da Vignola, found that the form of the ground plan and the site of the building were dictated by an incomplete fortress begun in the 1530s by Antonio da Sangallo the Younger - a project that had not gone further than the exterior walls on the ground floor. Vignola approached the unfinished structure as a challenge and opportunity to create a unique solution. What was built from 1559 onward had the form of a fortress and the function of a villa, but was in its extravagance an urban palace.

View the ground plan of Villa Farnese, Caprarola.